The Charts That Prove Everyone Eats Like America Now

As a tourist, you can track down a burger in Sub-Saharan Africa or find French fries in Laos. But increasingly, people everywhere are eating an extremely Westernized diet, too. In fact, today, global diets are 36 percent more similar than they were 50 years ago, according to a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Between 1961 and 2009, the global consumption of soybeans, sunflower, and palm oil-based products—"staples" of a classic Western diet—grew several orders of magnitude, while traditional diets based on crops such as sorghum, millets, sweet potatoes, and cassava declined, according to researchers at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture. The data, gleaned from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, backs up the idea that the world is increasingly relying on processed and other "Western" foods. Lead researcher Colin Khoury calls it "Western plus," because foods like potatoes, rice, and wheat are still eaten worldwide. But, more than ever, humans are now using those big three: soybeans, sunflowers, and palm oil, to create processed foods for people around the world.

Here's what it looks like: Over the last five decades, we've been getting many more calories from western staples and are increasingly using various oils to process our foods, while crops that were once prevalent in Africa and Southeast Asia have been used less and less.

The trend could have wide-ranging implications for global food security and health. Because humans are no longer getting their food from a wide variety of plants, global epidemics, such as the Irish Potato Famine or the American corn blight in the 1970s, become a more dangerous threat. And, as the world increasingly relies on fewer crops, those crops become more sensitive to price spikes with any sort of production interruption, which can lead to global unrest.

The Westernization of global diets also means that people are eating much more fat, calories, and protein. That could mean we eventually see a global uptick in obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, but overall, the changing diet has been relatively good for global health.

“In many cases, it has been positive for local diets because we’ve done quite a bit to resolve some issues of not having enough food,” Khoury said. “These major commodities like soybean oil, we don’t want to demonize them completely. They’ve had an important role to play.”

They've also, in some cases, been an environmental disaster. Wide swaths of the Amazon forest have been clearcut to plant soybeans, while tropical rainforests in southeast Asia have been destroyed to produce palm oil.

Khoury says there have been several important global drivers that have led to the homogenization of diets. Overall, local purchasing power has increased around the world, so consumers around the world are given more choice. Urbanization and globalization have led to greater international choice, while also marginalizing locally-grown foods to some extent.

“What people tend to do is they choose more oily, fatty food, more processed foods, when they have the chance,” he said. “In cities, they don’t have access to the wild greens and gardens anymore, they eat out more, they eat fast food more, they have access to supermarkets. They work more, so they cook less.”

That doesn’t mean the whole world is going to eventually become lazy, obese, and diseased. But we are all increasingly listening to the same music, watching the same movies, and reading the same websites. Why wouldn’t we eat the same food?